| With the rapid development of mass media, TV news interview programs have become more and more popular in recent years and drawn the attention of scholars both at home and abroad. The previous studies are mainly confined to the field of mass media. And from the perspective of linguistics, the relevant researches are mostly within the framework of discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. These different approaches have provided us with a better understanding of this particular genre. However, they neglect the fact that different voices of this genre interact with each other, and it is not just simple communication of the interviewers and the interviewees. This thesis aims to explore the characteristics of heteroglossia in TV news interview based on Martin's Appraisal Theory, focusing on the subsystem of engagement.Appraisal Theory is a system of semantic resources to explore, describe and explain the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positions and relationships. It is composed of three subsystems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. This thesis focuses on the Engagement subsystem with a view to find out what kind of engagement resources are preferred in TV news interview, how they help to express the speaker's opinions among the multi-voices, what rhetorical strategies the speakers adopt to realize different communicative purposes in each part of TV news interview, and what engagement features they share with or differ from each other and the reasons involved in these differences.Audio recordings of twenty five news interview programs from Dialogue are collected and transcribed for analysis. Both the quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted. The qualitative approach is used in the detailed analysis of discourse. It is valuable for understanding how the engagement resources are deployed to express the speaker's value positionings with respect to the alternative voices. In terms of quantitative approach, the statistical method with the help of Systemic Coder is employed to analyze the collected data to find out what kinds of engagement resources are frequently used in TV news interview to help the speaker to achieve his/her communicative purposes. Furthermore, through the comparative studies between different parts of TV news interview, the significant engagement features of each part including the narration part, the questioning part and the answering part are explored.Based on the statistics and detailed analysis of the data, the major findings are the following:Firstly, the distribution of engagement resources in TV news interview shows a great difference. Modality (50.3%) overwhelms all the other engagement resources, the resources of disclaim, deny (22.8%) and counter (13.6%) also play an important role in constructing the heteroglossic backdrop. The other engagement resources are comparatively less employed.Secondly, there are some similarities in engagement in each part of TV news interview. Both the hosts and the guests tend to employ the resources of modality and disclaim to construct the text as in tension with dialogic expansion and contraction. At the same time, with the help of the resources of modality with median and low values, the speakers moderate the tension of different viewpoints.Thirdly, there are also some significant differences in each part of TV news interview. And these prominent engagement features are consistent with their particular communicative purposes. In the narration part, the host employs a large number of dialogic expansion resources especially entertain resources to open up the dialogic space for the upcoming interview. In the questioning part, the host employs comparatively more resources of acknowledge to attribute the views to the external voices especially the public voice, helping him/her to promote the following questioning, especially about some sensitive issues. And in the answering part, the guests employ resources of deny to challenge and reject the opposite views and make clear their own positions. By dint of the subjective-explicit modality resources, the guests express their own views, and at the same time invite the dialogic alternatives to take part in the negotiation.Fourthly, the engagement patterns change in a prosodic way, which is consistent with the role changes in the interview. The different communicative purposes determine the selection of different engagement resources in different role relationships, and therefore different parts of TV news interview show differences in engagement patterns.Fifthly, all the above features are closely related with the register and generic characteristics of TV news interview. The sensitive and sharp topics, the multi-level relationships between the hosts and the guests, the guests and the audience, and the mode of TV news interview: the formal face-to-face interview together to determine and influence the engagement features in TV news interview. And the generic features of TV news interview determine the significant differences in engagement of different parts in TV news interview.This thesis contributes to the Appraisal Theory by applying it to a new genre: TV news interview. It provides a new perspective to study interpersonal meanings and serves as a tentative model for the exploration of the characteristics of heteroglossia encoded in other types of discourse. It also provides insights into news interview discourse, including its generic and stylistic features and the techniques of questioning and answering in the interview, and guides us to construct our own engagement patterns according to the communicative purposes. |
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